Even in Prison, There’s Room for Mothers’ Love

ATLANTA —  A Georgia state women’s prison is trying to improve relations between children and their imprisoned mothers with a new visiting area where they play together.

A survey of the 600 inmates at the Georgia Women’s Correctional Institution at Milledgeville found that more than half the mothers among them had never been visited by their children.

“They told us one of the reasons the children didn’t come to visit was because of the restrictive environment,” said Constance W. Shepard, a prison counselor.

Children have been allowed to visit their mothers in the prison gymnasium, said Warden Gary Black, but that was unsatisfactory.

“The children are often more of a nuisance than a pleasure in that setting,” he said. “We want to remove them to a place where it’s just the mothers and the children, where they can do children things, where they can talk and hug and hold each other.”

“You just can’t sit a 2-year-old in a chair and say, ‘Well, tell me what’s been happening,’ ” Shepard said.

The new visiting area, scheduled to open Saturday, “will be like a day-care-center environment, a room where the inmates and children can visit alone,” Shepard said. “There will be toys for the children to play with, and carpet on the floor so they can get down there and play together.”

Children now are not allowed to bring toys into the prison. Motherly chores, such as changing diapers, are performed by a guard.

To plan, Black visited a center at a federal prison in California.

“There will be a minimum of supervision,” he said. “In California, they found that the children, especially the younger ones, were frightened by many routine prison items--a walkie-talkie, for instance.”

“You have to learn to be a parent, and a lot of these women never had that opportunity,” Black said. “They have the additional problem now of trying to explain why they can’t go home with their child, why they are in prison, what they did wrong.”